Alternately: for each limb, device, or part grafted, the Biomechanik rolls once on the Ker-Frankenstein table. Same as the Medik, a properly equipped Biomechanik rolls 1d8, an improperply equipped one rolls 1d6, and each assistant increases the die by one size up to 1d12.

1 The creature turns on its creators.2-4 Something goes wrong. Roll for results.5+ The part is attached successfully.

As for the "Something goes Awry" subtable, it should only have a handful of options to keep it slim and not slow down the game much at all. I am thinking four or five at most.

1. (critical failure) It runs off and joins the other team (opposing player now takes control of that unit until the end of the game or until it is killed)2. The brain used was "Abby Normal's". It has a half-mind and is submissive, as per horses...3. Something went wrong with its dexterity. Skill becomes 1d6-14. Something went wrong with its speed. -1 Move (so 4" instead of 5")

Voin wrote:Also, if by memetic Darwinism you mean what I think you mean, then I'd have to raise issue with a lot of the "adaptations" being dummied down or the adapters not even bothering to read the source material. For example, it does nobody any good to portray Watson as a bumbling sidekick. Watson was a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, was pretty much as smart as Holmes (albeit in different fields), and kicked serious ass alongside Holmes. And the portrayals by Jude Law and Martin Freeman bring back badass Watson, rather than continue slogging along with the lame Watson that was unfortunately ingrained in the public subconscious through decades of half-assed adaptations.

Memetic Darwinism is fine if it makes us picture Batman as the dark, kickass Nolan version, rather than the campy old 60s TV one (or worse yet, Schumaker's Bat-nipples version), but if it takes a character or concept that was originally awesome (like vampires) and waters it down to some unrecognizable sparkly-fairy, effeminite-goth, wants-to-have-sex-with-you-but-cannot-becuase-teenage-angst bullshit, then it's a load of crap and need to be culturally rejected.

Survival of the fittest. If the lame version wins over the awesome version, then the lame version must have been more compelling somehow.

But it seems unlikely that the lame versions will win in the long run. Bumbling Watson came into prominence during the 20th century when the western world needed to reassure itself in the primacy of messianic experts and geniuses in the face of world-wide political and economic collapses and the advent of the nuclear bomb. (This is the same schema that brought us Doctor Who.) Think about which producers benefit from selling that view of reality, and which populations of consumers are comforted by buying into it, and then you see why "a normal guy like me does not need to fear seemingly unsolvable problems because a super expert is able to solve everything" was briefly much more attractive and successful than "two super-competent bros fight crime together."

Nowadays nobody believes they're helpless; our problem instead is what's called the super-empowered individual. The terrorist bringing Boston to its knees isn't some criminal mastermind with a secret island volcano hideout, it's a kid with a pressure-cooker in a backpack and a connection to the internet. Thanks the advance of consumer technology, every one of us has powers and resources that were reserved only for nation-states only a couple of decades ago. So our fantasies aren't the fantasies of helpless people wishing for someone to protect helpless people anymore. Now we fantasize about being badasses, and the modern memetic environment has no room for a bumbling Watson. His meme shrivels and dies in a culture like ours.

(Now make your helpless character a woman, on the other hand, and people will still eat that shit up. Western culture still loves treating women like helpless props for male adventures.)

Voin wrote:So if we want more depictions of strong, independent female characters in media (and not just fap-fodder like Lara Croft), then women need to step up their game and make such characters happen.

This recent thing with Gamergate isn't something new. If you've spent any time working in video games and entertainment, you've seen women get harrassed and hounded out until they're forced to leave the industry, over and over and over again. It's not a once-in-awhile thing, I've seen it at literally every video game company I've ever worked at, and at every (non-indie) video game company anyone I've known has ever worked at. The weird thing would be to see a woman in video games not being abused.

I don't know if you have any women friends in the game industry; I have probably around a hundred. Ask them to tell you about the industry abuse sometime. Every one of them will have a story.

Voin wrote:In America, your silence is your consent. I know Hollywood isn't exactly a democracy, but we still vote with our dollars - that's how a free market works.

That's part of what I was saying about memetic Darwinism. But, also like American democracy, we only get to "vote" on the options that the richest top tier allow - politicians who are on the side of anyone with less than a billion dollars in the corporate account are not picked up by the major parties. Instead, 99% of the time, we're stuck choosing between either a Republican or a Democrat, rather than someone who isn't going to fuck us bloody and then send us a bill for the dry-cleaning.

So yeah, we're stuck holding out hope for the indies to take over and get us all out from under the thumbs of the corporate interests who are vested in propagating the male-hero-female-object schema (because market segmentation makes marketing a hell of a lot easier and more profitable). If you could see my online friendslists, you'd see a couple hundred of their names; they're out there plugging away, although they're never going to get the millions of dollars of corporate marketing support like Chad Penis-Haver would.

I guess even I count as an indie game maker, sort of, although being limited to Lego means that I tend to hit the gender thing from a screwy angle.

Voin wrote:And at the end of that episode, someone slimier than a typical lawyer shows up in the courtroom - Al Sharpton bursts in (apropos of nothing) and exclaims "Let her, play the part, give us a black Spider-Man too while you're at it! Yaddah, yadda, etc"

Oh my god, have you ever been involved in something that got surprise co-opted by Al Sharpton? It happened to me once back in the nineties in New York. It's completely accurate, he really does burst in apropos of nothing exactly as depicted. You end up just standing around with your jaw hanging open wondering what the hell just happened.

Voin wrote:But would people like Sharpton be as supportive if Storm, Luke Cage (Power Man), or the Falcon were suddenly portrayed by an Asian or Hispanic actor?

I'm going to have to object on the grounds that there are no other people like Sharpton. He is a species to himself.

stubby wrote:I don't know if you have any women friends in the game industry; I have probably around a hundred. Ask them to tell you about the industry abuse sometime. Every one of them will have a story.

Actually some of them are on this forum, now that I think of it. I just asked one of them "hey, why don't you make games with female leads?" and she said, and I quote, "Because someone would blow up my house and rape my dog. We tried it, and that's what happens."

So there you go. There are more forces at play than just whether people are voting with their dollars.

stubby wrote:I don't know if you have any women friends in the game industry; I have probably around a hundred. Ask them to tell you about the industry abuse sometime. Every one of them will have a story.

Actually some of them are on this forum, now that I think of it. I just asked one of them "hey, why don't you make games with female leads?" and she said, and I quote, "Because someone would blow up my house and rape my dog. We tried it, and that's what happens."

So there you go. There are more forces at play than just whether people are voting with their dollars.

Voin wrote:Any sort of societal change is a complex process, I understand that. And yes, I am aware of the struggles women developers face, and I respect their efforts. But what about women consumers? Those market shares only exist because the consumers choose to throw their money at one thing over another. The rich and powerful are that way because those around them allowed them to be.

To that I say (a) choosing one thing over another isn't a choice when both the one things and the others are all the same thing. Walmart doesn't stock the non-Chad-Penishaver products, and less than 10% of the U.S. / 5% of Europe is on Steam. And (b), women consumers get hounded out the same as women creators. Ask your friends what happens to them in online games when the other players find out they're women.

Voin wrote:Yes, there are plenty of popular things that us thinking people tend to agree is objectively shit - Smiley Virus, the Transformers movies, Congress, etc. And yet, these trashheaps remain in their place because the masses - not just tbe power elite - allow them to. Congress' approval rating has been at an all-time low, and yet 2012 was a year when the majority of incumbents got re-elected.

What does that tell you about the options on the table? If you hate the guy in office, but you're stuck with him because the only other option on the ballot is even worse, the problem isn't that the voting public is stupid. It's that the political duopoly prevents us from having real options.

Voin wrote:And what about gender/race-neutral games like Fallout, The Elder Scrolls, Mass Effect, Knights of the Old Republic, etc? Those are some very popular games, they made a lot of money, and you can choose for the protagonist to be something other than " white, dark-haired, 30-something male". And that's not even counting MMOs like WoW, thatalso have a plethora of character choices.

Yeah, BioWare games are my favorites, but even I would never claim that any of them were games about female protagonists. They're games about generic protagonists. You might as well be playing as a rectangle with options for different colored polka dots.

Doing the math and assuming that both the DOTA 2 users make up all of the Steam users, which they don't, and that people only have one of these 4 options, which they don't, that 9.6 million would be 27%* of the market. Since both of those assumptions are not true, that percentage only goes up.

*I'll note that I'm both not including older systems and handheld systems in this percentage. I figure that people who only own older systems don't count in this issue because they cannot buy new titles, so they are not in the current market. The handheld systems become much more difficult because I assume that a very large portion of those users also have a home system as well. I'm also not sure if handheld systems really can compare directly to Steam because they share few to no games.

Voin wrote:The fight for what's rightfully yours doesn't come easy. I'm of <insert 'MURICAN> descent, and nearly every holiday of my people revolves around narrowly escaping genocide. The <insert COMMIES> threatened drive us to extinction, and that was the last straw. In response, <insert 'MURICA> reformed as a nation of warriors that take shit from no-one, and bigots mess with it at their own peril.... Those that voiced this nationalistic opinion to my face got my fist in theirs. I refused to be the victim, refused to allow the bigots to feel strong in their hateful position. I paid for that righteous retribution with many entanglement with the authorities, but I don't regret it - I gave those foolish enough to look down on me exactly what they had coming.

I'm not calling anyone in the wrong here, (if anything I am) but this would make a superb prologue to a Chad-Penis-Haver film.

Steam has a little over 75 million users; 40% in Europe, 41% in North America (so I'm lumping in the Canadians and Mexicans, I guess). That's 30 million each. The U.S. has a population of > 300 million, Europe > 700 million. So, 5% to 10% market penetration. 90% of people will never be aware that indie games even exist apart from Minecraft. Meanwhile, the Penishaver games have their billboards and Super Bowl ads and 24/7 marketing campaigns.

Same is true for third party candidates and even major-party candidates that don't fit the party narrative. The system is rigged so that if you don't fit the major party mold, you don't get news coverage, you don't get campaign funds from either federal matching or party coffers, you don't get invited to debates, you're erased from the mainstream narrative. Remember all the news coverage of Ron Paul in the last election cycle? No you don't, because the political machine decided he wasn't going to be part of the story, and so the option was removed. Diehards tried to spread the word on the internet, but they had no chance of reaching the bread-and-butter Wal-mart shoppers that make up the base of the American electorate. They never even knew there was an option they were missing out on.

Voin wrote:What happened to women when they stood up for the right to vote? Those suffragists faced real physical violence from the institution, not "internet tough-guys" jerking off in their mom's basements. Those heroines weathered the storm, and made their voices be head louder than those of the haters.

Getting swatted and doxxed and losing your bank account and job and your nude photos sent to your family and friends are still pretty bad, even if nobody's gotten murdered yet. Tracking down your kids and threatening them and sending their photos to child pornographers to distribute isn't the same as getting beaten up, but I think I'd rather get beat up. These "internet tough guys" are ruining lives.

Voin wrote:I'm of Jewish descent, and nearly every holiday of my people revolves around narrowly escaping genocide. The Holocaust threatened drive us to extinction, and that was the last straw.

I'm of Gypsy descent; ask me how many Rayhawks were left in the world after the Holocaust. We got cut down to a population of 2. (And ironically the two weren't speaking to each other. We didn't get to reconcile the two remaining halves of the line until after they died.)

Voin wrote:And then there are all the people who say "well, the system is broken beyond repair, so I'm not gonna bother with voting". These perpetuate the problem too, through inaction.

Nah, it's just like indie games rejecting the traditional publishers. You still vote, but you don't expect that to fix anything on its own, and you work to find other ways to force solutions through while the established power structures continue their long slow grinding failure.

Voin wrote:

stubby wrote:Yeah, BioWare games are my favorites, but even I would never claim that any of them were games about female protagonists. They're games about generic protagonists. You might as well be playing as a rectangle with options for different colored polka dots.

And that's the beauty of it - your character can be whoever you want them to be - nobody has to feel alienated.

As long as you can ignore the slavering hordes of troglodyte gamers attacking you the moment you drop even the barest hint that you might be a girl, sure. Or attacking any game that carries suspicious odors of girlism, or the insufficiently masculine players who play them. "Not alienated" isn't the same as "included."

Steam has a little over 75 million users; 40% in Europe, 41% in North America (so I'm lumping in the Canadians and Mexicans, I guess). That's 30 million each. The U.S. has a population of > 300 million, Europe > 700 million. So, 5% to 10% market penetration. 90% of people will never be aware that indie games even exist apart from Minecraft. Meanwhile, the Penishaver games have their billboards and Super Bowl ads and 24/7 marketing campaigns.

Okay, but I don't think that your analogy works too well here then. In order to realistically compare Steam to 3rd Party Political Groups, you can only look at the total amount of people who play video games because if someone doesn't play video games, then they aren't really watching any ads for the big box titles either.

All right then. According to ESA statistics, 180 million Americans play video games. Even if all of the 30 million North America Steam users are in the U.S., it still means a market penetration of only 17% among actual gamers.

Spreading word-of-mouth, at least the way we're able to do it, works for that segment of the population that gets their word-of-mouth from the internet. I wish you could reach a majority of people through the internet, it'd definitely make my job easier. But a little less than half of America logs into social media at all, and most of those aren't living on the internet the way some of us do. It's not that they're too lazy to google up indie games or sit around listening to Pandora. It's that they're not spending enough time connected to the internet to know that googling up indie games is even an option. A third of American households don't have broadband internet access at all, whether through computers or smart devices or otherwise; Pandora and YouTube don't even exist for them. 15% have never been on the internet.

We have this idea that everyone's on the internet because all the people we see and interact with are on the internet. But unfortunately this is still a pretty limited slice of the real population. Spend a little time working in some broad-spectrum marketing campaigns and you'll see just how little of the population has any significant online presence whatsoever.

The reason YouTube and news-site comments are stupid isn't (only) because people are stupid, it's because most people don't use the internet for socializing and so they have no idea how it works. I always tell the new marketing kids to go hang out in the DMV to remind themselves what "real" average Americans look like, rather than the people they encounter in their social circles. I could just as well tell them to go read YouTube comments to remind themselves how sophisticated "real" average Americans are about using the internet.

Oh sure, the not depressing part is to think about how connected we are now, and then remember how connected we were in 2010, and 2005, and 2000. Just because the internet isn't the all-pervasive democratizing tool in 2014 that we wish it was, 2020 will be a whole new ballgame. Part of why stuff like Gamergate and Ferguson and the Arab Spring are all blowing up the way they have been is because everything is transforming so fast. People are getting forcibly engaged whether they like it or not.

At least as of right now in the U.S., people who aren't engaged on the internet fall into three main categories:

6. Senior citizens, who are dying off year by year and being replaced by a more tech-savvy generation7. Households making less than $30k, who are getting integrated anyway as the cost of technology is driven continuously downward8. Adults with less than a high school education... well not much you can do about them I guess, but two out of three ain't bad.